Finalist in the environmental primary, Sandrine Rousseau was ousted from Yannick Jadot's team last week, following statements critical of the candidate in the press.
In an interview with
20 Minutes
, the elected official confirms that she will vote for Yannick Jadot on April 10, even if she considers her exclusion "absurd".
"There is a lack of a more left-wing debate [in the candidate's campaign], on a social and popular ecology," said Sandrine Rousseau.
Ousted Thursday after her criticism of Yannick Jadot's campaign, Sandrine Rousseau counterattacks.
The one who narrowly lost the ecologist primary absolutely refuses the label of divider of her camp.
For the academic, if the voting intentions for the environmentalist presidential candidate are so low, it is because the candidate has not reached out enough to the left wing of the electorate.
What's next?
Sandrine Rousseau leaves the door open for the legislative elections and the EELV congress, but clearly explains to
20 Minutes
that she is here to stay.
You denounced a “fuzzy” campaign speech from Yannick Jadot, “a mess”, according to remarks reported by
Le Parisien
last week.
Do you understand your ousting from his campaign team?
I take note of it but it seems absurd to me.
Not next to me, but politically: it is a message of withdrawal, where it is now more than ever a question of gathering.
Isn't it legitimate, from the point of view of the candidate's team, to expect loyalty during the campaign, especially from a candidate in the primary?
I challenge you to find the times when I haven't been loyal.
While every day, someone changes candidate, I have never deviated from my line or my word: I am both loyal to half of the primary electorate who supported me - and that no one has the right to cancel – and faithful to the result of this primary, which incontestably made Yannick Jadot the candidate of the ecologists for this election.
Unity does not feed on uniformity, but on coming together.
It wasn't the first criticism we saw in the press...
No, I didn't criticize in the press!
The offending remarks come from discussions recognized as private, which a journalist has chosen to put in a very approximate way in the public square.
Who benefits from the crime?
There is an ethical question here that concerns the profession.
For the rest, in my public remarks, I have never done anything but try to defend a political balance.
What is missing in this campaign for environmentalists?
A message for the left wing!
What is missing is a more left-wing debate, on a social and popular ecology.
This is what I embodied and I see that many people who have supported me have gone to Jean-Luc Mélenchon since primary school.
There, of course, since my ouster, it's even worse.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon rose in the polls as Yannick Jadot fell.
We must bring to life a pluralism of ecology.
But hasn't the political line been decided by the environmentalist primary, precisely?
The primary decided who would be the candidate.
But with a result of 51%/49%, it has precisely shown that the line is not unequivocal.
This is why we absolutely needed to find forms of compromise, to consult, to bring a plural ecology to life.
We cannot do without half an electorate.
And, in fact, Yannick Jadot's voting intentions have dropped significantly since the primary.
After the primary, you became president of the political council of the candidate.
Was it a jump seat?
You were unable to influence the campaign in that place?
Concretely, this political advice was useless, it had no influence on the political line.
In the historical context of a war in Europe, I was not even consulted on the position to take, I discovered it in the press.
But this political advice was a symbol of unity, it had a real political meaning, that's why I accepted it and then tried to bring about a balance.
The problem is that a small circle around Yannick Jadot and at the head of the party never accepted the signal sent by the primary, perhaps because my personality shakes them up too much.
They wanted to make this sequence disappear rather than rely on it to build a balance that would have allowed us to expand our electorate, it's a waste.
You said last week that Yannick Jadot should have a “greener” position on Ukraine.
What do you think would be a “greener” position?
That would be to say that there, the absolute urgency is to do without Russian gas and nuclear power very quickly.
Today, Yannick Jadot says it, and that's good, but he started by talking about arms deliveries, without even understanding very well whether it was for the army or civilians.
Even if the Ukrainian men and women's will to resist is overwhelming, deliberately arming civilians against soldiers is not necessarily a service to be rendered to them.
This weekend, you were in Toulouse where, during a conference, you declared, according to
La Dépêche du Midi
: “It depresses me to do politics in groups of the Ku Klux Klan”.
Who or what are you targeting?
Your own side?
I was obviously not aiming for my own side.
I was saying two things: first that we have a historic rise in France of white supremacism, assumed, claimed, embodied by Eric Zemmour.
Simply using the word “extreme right” to describe what is happening obscures the reality.
When in 2008 Zemmour said face to Rokhaya Diallo, "You belong to the black race and I to the white race", it is really very clear.
I wanted to warn about this.
Especially since this identity-based and supremacist extreme right threatens all activists, all left-wing activists and in particular me, since in this case, at the conference to which I was invited, we had to increase the level of security, and it was not the first time.
Secondly, I wanted to say that, apart from the extreme right, the working-class neighborhoods are not sufficiently represented in the parties.
We have to say it!
We, as ecologists, have a particular duty to seek them out and to ensure that we also present an ecology from these working-class neighborhoods.
The sentence was deliberately provocative but obviously excessive.
My mistake is that I should have understood, since no one ever passes me anything, that this sentence was going to be a highlight in the political debate.
Are you still seeking to be a candidate in the legislative elections in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, where you were clearly ahead in an advisory vote of local activists?
Yes !
In this advisory vote there were very few voters.
In the women's college, 21 people voted, I got 4 votes and the person who arrived first got 12. I think we have to put the scope of this failure into perspective.
Yesterday, in Toulouse, I made a field trip, I went to support citizen collectives against the closure of schools or the artificialization of soils, I gave this conference… There was really a crazy crowd!
The contact with the inhabitants of the 13th that I started to meet was good, I am confident.
Not only am I remaining an environmentalist, I am staying at EELV, but I am also continuing to represent something.
It wouldn't be a very good sign if I wasn't a candidate.
We've been hearing a lot of rumors for weeks about a hypothetical intention to take the helm of EELV in 2022, or even to set up your own movement.
What about today ?
I am an environmentalist.
I left this party once, following sexual violence suffered within this party.
There's no way I'm leaving.
You still have to measure my story and its scope.
Moreover, it is quite surprising that, systematically, I am perceived as having weak, bad intentions.
I simply do politics and I represent a political current which we will have to accept that it exists.
We minimize each time the collective that we represent.
Are you being passed off as the “divider”?
Ah yes !
Once again, I would really like us to analyze this: who divides whom?
Should your eviction be viewed in the light of possible ambitions within the party?
What happened on Thursday is still very bizarre.
There was a press release, I haven't received a message since.
And since then, all the party cadres – and especially the men – go on the sets to explain how dangerous I am.
Me, the only thing I can say is that my family is ecology.
That I want a gathering ecology, a popular ecology, a social ecology.
That's today's topic.
In this context, will you vote for Yannick Jadot on April 10 in the first round of the presidential election?
I will vote Yannick Jadot on April 10 because I am responsible for two.
That is to say that I do not lose sight of the fact that the important thing is ecology.
Elections
Yannick Jadot separates from Sandrine Rousseau and deplores "interference"
Elections
Sandrine Rousseau excluded from Yannick Jadot's campaign team
Primary environmentalist
Yannick Jadot
Presidential election 2022
Europe Ecology The Greens (EELV)
Elections
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